Thank God For Google

Grab your pitchfork and join the lynch mob: someone is making money.

That's what Matt Drudge would have us do, at least. He accused Google of "robbing" the government of $60 billion in a headline on his site this week. How'd they pull off a heist like that, you ask? By doing their best to legally avoid America's suffocatingly high corporate tax rates.

Opponents of a federal income tax warned us about this kind of mentality when the 16th amendment was being debated. The government owns everything you produce. They let you keep what's left over in your paycheck out of the goodness of their heart. After all, they're free to take 100% of your income if they want.

All wealth belongs to society (i.e. government), according to this collectivist philosophy. Thus, any wealth the State lets you keep is a cost to society (i.e. government). Taxes don't cost you anything, but tax cuts rob the public (i.e. government). This "logic" obscures the fact that if Google paid more taxes, the American people wouldn't be any better off. Just the government would.

Collectivists reason that since the college student who started Google received a government scholarship, there's no question that the government should own everything Google ever produced. But nobody applies such a silly standard to the wealth earned by other successful firms that got started thanks to a loan or gift of money from a benefactor. Why should the benefactor have a claim to all the wealth that firm produces?

Instead of cooking up ways to eat productive businesses like Google, we ought to thank them for the tons of awesome services they provide for free. How often do you use Google's search engine, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Blogspot, YouTube, or any of the other products they host--products that would have blown your mind, fifteen years ago? And how many times have you ever had to pay a fee? How many of those things do you think they would be able to provide, if they were paying 35% in taxes rather than 2.4%? Heck, they might not be in business today if they had been paying such high taxes. Better 2.4% of something than 35% of nothing.

The government won't crack down on Google's tax dodging, if they know what's good for them. Unless they want to run some of the world's greatest companies out of the States altogether. We the public would do well to zip our "eat-the-rich", populist rhetoric as well, and recognize how lucky we are to have top-notch firms like Google in our backyard.

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Published at RightOSphere.com.